Geometric Rectification of Camera-Captured Document Images

Compared to typical scanners, handheld cameras offer convenient, flexible, portable, and noncontact image capture, which enables many new applications and breathes new life into existing ones. However, camera-captured documents may suffer from distortions caused by a nonplanar document shape and perspective projection, which lead to the failure of current optical character recognition (OCR) technologies. We present a geometric rectification framework for restoring the frontal-flat view of a document from a single camera-captured image. Our approach estimates the 3D document shape from texture flow information obtained directly from the image without requiring additional 3D/metric data or prior camera calibration. Our framework provides a unified solution for both planar and curved documents and can be applied in many, especially mobile, camera-based document analysis applications. Experiments show that our method produces results that are significantly more OCR compatible than the original images.